What is the point of converting this software?

@samir I heard that Rust has one of those packaging systems like Python, NodeJS etc where anyone can simply upload a package for others to import, with no checking whatsoever. These are rife with abuse and if Rust indeed has an equivalent system, it is certainly not more secure.

@samir Thing is, we're not critical. We're fungible assets.

@samir I think there’s a lot of magical thinking about rust. ‘Rust is memory-safe’ is somehow enough on its own to outweigh all of the other reasons not to rewrite software from scratch, and all of the other potential sources of bugs get forgotten about.

@samir fish has successfully been rewritten in Rust. By the maintainer, because he wanted to do it, bit by bit.

As you say, the people are the important part. Everyone wants to replace them with slop these days. Until the house of cards crashes down and the slop spills everywhere.

@samir i don't this think this take will surprise anyone on fedi but this is looking more and more like they're just trying to solve the 'problem' of needing expertise and healthy culture to solve complicated domain specific problems. once upon a time you would handle this by doing things like hiring people & mentoring jr's & maintaining your spaces and stuff so there would be a constant flow of reliable people who do this type of thing

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116030177478995194

What is the point of converting this software?

Who’s gonna maintain it?

Unless you have interest from the maintainers, you have a bunch of code that no one uses and no one maintains. Good job, folks.

I see nothing on these sites that explain how they hope to drum up maintenance, or even engage the maintainers of the original code.

Once again, the critical part of FOSS is ignored. It’s the people.

@drwho Only until stuff breaks.

@samir By that time, the folks who worked on it got laid off and they hire a fresh set of disposable coders to fix it. #BTDT

@samir Just let the AI maintain it… I’m sure a prompt like “Maintain this code base.” would do the trick… /s

All we then need is somebody to actually use the slop. Maybe AI could do that too. Seems best…

@mkoek It does, but I dispute that this is any less secure than e.g. GitHub.

@samir AI often hallucinates package names. Bad guys squat malware on those names. I don’t think that’s easily done with a C/C++ codebase. With AI-translated Rust code, it could happen. A bigger risk than potential buffer overflows in a mature C program, I think.

@samir But bottom line (almost literally) the whole thing seems to be about getting it funded…

“Perhaps the biggest barrier, however, will be convincing the U.S. government to fund the project, says Ji, particularly at the scale envisaged. She thinks a more realistic goal might be to solicit funding from the private sector for a proof of concept.”

It’s a get rich quick plan. 🤮

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/116030177478995194

What is the point of converting this software?

Who’s gonna maintain it?

Unless you have interest from the maintainers, you have a bunch of code that no one uses and no one maintains. Good job, folks.

I see nothing on these sites that explain how they hope to drum up maintenance, or even engage the maintainers of the original code.

Once again, the critical part of FOSS is ignored. It’s the people.

@samir this field is deranged

@samir "The Institute for Progress" sounds like another "effective altruism" wankfest.

@samir I had a guest and I played the above without reading the details. I insist, this field is deranged

@gpcureton @samir Right on the money.

Their website uses AI-generated images for post thumbnails and promotes AI, their open position for an Editor explicitly says that you should be comfortable working with LLMs, it reminded me of the accelerationist movement, but since you've also mentioned effective altruism, it turns out there's a subset named "effective accelerationism" which is used in the corporate world.

IFP partially matches e/acc, they push for accelerated technological progress through US-centric reforms, they're also pro-AI and pro-innovation but they're not (or haven't revealed to be AI maximalists), so it's not explicitly e/acc, just smells a bit like it.

To further that, three of the foundations funding IFP - Astera Foundation, Coefficient Giving and Heising-Simmons Foundation are EA donors or EA-aligned, and IFP may have received funding in the past from none other than one of the poster boys of EA, Sam Bankman-Fried, at least according to an EA forum page on IFP.

@gpcureton @samir But wait, it gets better (or worse?).

I checked IFP on ProPublica, in the 2022 and 2021 Form 990 filings (https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/872449729/202300699349300540/full), the org name is "INSTITUTE FOR PROGRESS AND ALTRUISM".

Part III 4a mentions "[...]. As a non-profit research and advocacy organization, IFP brings the best ideas from the progress studies and effective altruism communities to policymakers in Washington, DC."

In their 'preparing for launch' page they mention they borrow ideas from defensive accelerationism (https://ifp.org/preparing-for-launch/).

So yeah, IFP is that type of woo-woo techbro policy-wonk.

@samir "rust rewrite" is rapidly becoming a nebulously security-flavored term that people lacquer onto something indiscriminately, like "encryption" or "vpn". all things that are real and work and are good, but lacking any of the context of when or why they are good

@samir Ah, but the AI will maintain it.

That way, we can bring more FOSS under oligarch control!